US President Joe Biden has said that attacks on the Houthis will continue even as he acknowledged that the group have not stopped their Red Sea attacks.
The US carried out a fifth round of strikes on Yemen on Thursday after a US ship was struck by a Houthi drone.
White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters that US forces “took out a range of Houthi missiles” that were about to be fired towards the Red Sea.
He said the American attacks took place on Wednesday and again on Thursday.
On Wednesday, a Houthi drone hit a “US owned and operated bulk carrier ship” which later had to be rescued by India’s navy. It came as the US designated the Houthis as a terrorist organisation.
“Well, when you say working are they stopping the Houthis? No,” Mr Biden told reporters in Washington DC on Thursday before he left for a speech in North Carolina.
“Are they gonna continue? Yes.”
…until morale improves.
Not sure there was anything else going to happen about this. Houthis are shooting missiles so now they get missiles shot back in the hopes they’ll stop.
Or you know, just broker a ceasefire in gaza
Yeah just stop the fighting there, ezpz
Not a peace deal just a ceasefire
Yeah, it’s just that simple. /s. The absolute maximum leverage the US has (short of threatening invasion) would be to withdraw aid. We could certainly do that, but China and/or Russia would be more than happy to take on the job. Do you figure that would be helpful to the Palestinians? These dumb shit takes on foreign policy drive me nuts.
It’s totally unexpected that bombing the mountain tribe that has turned into a very successful rebel group, with the same stuff they’ve been bombed with by Saudi Arabia for years, would not actually stop them and make them change their minds.
I mean, weren’t both the US Adminstration and British Cabinet implying just a weak ago that the one strike back then would be it?!
Surelly the History of US and UK interventions in the Middle East did not at all hint that one single strike against such an adversary would be enough???!
Oh and by the way, for our dutch friends: Et was heel erg stom om met de VS en de VK mee te gaan (it was really stupid to go along with the US and UK).
When the Arab coalition got closer to Hudidah port to stop Iranian arms to reach the Houthi. The UK intervene claiming “Famine and war crimes”
They wanted the Houthi there because the Saudi will keep buying militry aid.
Now these same port and more got bombed with no media talking about famine or war crimes.
It was a bit obvious.
What’s more interesting - if US would continue to bomb them, would other actors take an opportunity against rebels? Yemeni monarchy, for example. Reigniting another war would be even more disastorous.
I’m sure both the recognized Yemeni government and Saudi Arabia are absolutely stoked about this. It’s actually a bit weird how exuberant the Houthis seem about it all given how many people are sharpening knives in the background.
Nope, totally wrong. KSA has demanded the US stop attacks.
Just because you beat your wife all the time, doesn’t mean you’ll let anyone else do it.
After the humanitarian disaster of Decisive Storm, it’s hard to understand. Maybe enough Iranian money can cure one of empathy.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters that US forces “took out a range of Houthi missiles” that were about to be fired towards the Red Sea.
US Central Command - which oversees US operations in the Middle East - said in a statement that it had “conducted strikes on two Houthi anti-ship missiles that were aimed into the Southern Red Sea and were prepared to launch” on Thursday.
“US forces identified the missiles in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen” around 15:40 local time (12:40GMT) “and determined they were an imminent threat to merchant vessels and US Navy ships in the region”.
Also on Thursday, the leader of the Houthis delivered a fiery hour-long televised speech in which he called it a “great honour” to be “in direct confrontation” with Israel, the US and the UK.
Since then, the group has launched dozens of attacks on commercial tankers passing through the Red Sea, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
The strikes - supported by Australia, Bahrain, the Netherlands and Canada - began after Houthi forces ignored an ultimatum to cease attacks in the region.
The original article contains 469 words, the summary contains 184 words. Saved 61%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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The Houthis attacked ships on the Red Sea. This could:
- Violate international law
- Destabilize the region
- Have an impact on global trade
The Houthis fucked up and America is punishing them understandingly so. Can’t say the same for helping Israel but we should analyze events fairly and not have a knee-jerk reaction with " 'Murca bad" all the time.
The US has spent decades developing and deploying smart munitions in an effort to be the good guys and minimize civilian casualties. It’s all very laudable but, in return, terrorists like the Houthis and Hamas have learned to hide more effectively in the civilian population, effectively creating human shields, which is a war crime.
It is probably true that a few retaliatory strikes won’t stop the Houthis from firing their Iranian missiles at civilian shipping. Something more drastic may be necessary. For example, I can’t imagine that Egypt is particularly happy about the reduction in traffic through Suez, nor should any bordering country be happy with missiles flying around over a shipping lane. It’s also an environmental disaster waiting to happen.
President has wide latitude in matters like this. Air strikes in this context are legal for him. He can even deploy troops as long as their deployment isn’t longer then 60 days.
At least he’s not making fun of anybody on Twitter.
Who can we vote for that will not be a war crazed bastard or con man?
IDK… Jesus?
Wow. As a progressive left voting Democrat, getting downvoted for not agreeing with establishment. OK, thanks. Lesson learned. Thanks democrats.
This is so fucking stupid.
Pros:
- Doing so feels good/ on brand
- Funds the military industrial complex
- Popular among the neocons who Democrats think choose the president
- Allows us to keep assisting with a genocide
Cons:
- Guaranteed to escalate
- Costs us international influence
- Costs us billions of dollars
- Raises the prices of goods
- Makes the electorate nervous and unlikely to reelect a president who seems to only oversee rising tension
- Further entrenches the impression that we’re not actually a formidable threat if you learn basic geurilla tactics and don’t mind waiting us out
- Further establishes our deep affection for genocide
- Increases the likelihood of dozens of unstable and unpredictable indirect consequences
- Oh… and strengthens the targets of our attacks and aligns with the adversaries goals
Biden is fucking EVERYTHING up. He’s fucking up the middle east, he’s fucking up his reelection, and in turn he’s going to fuck us all right back into the Trump dimension.
This is SO fucking stupid.
What’s with these anti American hot takes that don’t make any sense.
Your proposal is what exactly, to let Iranian backed terrorists to disrupt like 20% of the global shipping?
That would be fucking stupid.
I think your comment illustrates one of the biggest problems with our foreign policy.
We appear to have completely lost our ability to think laterally or strategically. I get why my comment seems crazy when you think our only options are “ATTACK” and “surrender”.
We need a strategic solution. The Houthis WANT a direct confrontation. They’ve said so, and their behavior is consistent with that. To figure out how to get them to stop, we need to ask: why on god’s green earth do a group of Yemeni rebels WANT a fight with the United States??
The short answer is that they hate us deeply for the incredible violence and destruction we inflicted on them and continue to inflict on them and the people they sympathize with. And we’ve destroyed so much of Yemen that they have nothing to lose. We turned it into a hellscape wasteland, so there is nothing more we can really threaten them with, and dying a proud and defiant death is pretty much the best offer on the menu. Plus, they know that if we fight, it’ll hurt us badly, just like all the last few wars have. We’ll spend too much, probably send troops eventually, and ultimately leave having accomplished nothing. And any surviving militants will declare victory and rule over ashes. Afghanistan provided a very appealing model of how to defeat the US.
So, strategically, what if… they had a reason to not want to die? What if … I don’t know, we negotiated with partners in the region to help them grow some crops, and maybe provide them with a new security arrangement where we don’t just sweep in every 10 years and light all their children and grandparents on fire? And concurrently, what if we tried to find ways to reduce their access to weapons?
Violence is not going to work. The region is spiraling out of control, and blowing everything up is easier for all the desperate radicals we’ve created across multiple nations than protecting our shipping lanes is for us. If violence no longer carries deterrence, it’s only utility is extermination. And if we embrace extermination, we radicalize more people. You can’t eradicate out of that situation, and trying just turns you into another of history’s great monsters.
It’s bad. We need to rediscover the concept of strategy.
Okay, our strategy in Yemen was to oppose Saleh, far right dictator who ruled Yemen from 1979 to 2012. The US lent support to plans to organize a popular revolution against Saleh starting in 2011. The people won and Saleh left office disgraced.
Yemen might have been okay, if after democratically electing a new president twice, the Houthi’s had not tried to assassinate him, seized control of the government, and completed a successful coup. Perhaps there would have been no civil war if the Houthis did not have such hatred for democracy and such love of authoritarian theocracy and religious rule. That’s when America came for them. They were already terrorists.
From the position trying to secure the best strategic outcome, though, what does that tell us? That sounds like a lot of opinions on the past, but what guidance do you take from all that?
Direct confrontation still fulfills their strategic objectives, and presents a nearly unwinnable situation. Instead, what would limit their willingness and ability to fight?
One thing would be ending our support for Israel’s wildly unpopular violent occupation. I hear people say that the Houthis are just cynically seizing on this morally and emotionally powerful cause to maintain popularity among the people of Yemen. And even if that’s true, it still serves our strategic interest to take that valuable asset away from them.
The Houthis assisted in the planning and carrying out of the October 7 attack. They’ve been Iranian proxies and ideological allies of all sorts of fundamentalist terrorists since they came into existence.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthi_movement
Nothing will limit their willingness to fight. But drone strikes can end their ability to threaten their neighbors. Push them back into their hole, let them scream “death to America” into an increasingly smaller spit of empty desert with dwindling prospects for continued habitability. Maybe their people will get tired of not having nice things or will realize “death to America” won’t put food on the table. Maybe not, and eventually their neighbor is going to get sick of their bullshit and swallow them up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Saudi_Arabia_proxy_conflict
This feels like a bunch of Bush era talking points.
They aren’t orcs. There’s this notion that our adversaries are unable to demonstrate the self control they need to make environments safe to raise kids but possess motivation for self destruction that is inexaustible.
After exclusively putting more and more weight on the boot on their collective neck with nothing buts decades of successive failure, let’s try something else.
For those unmotivated by Christian mercy, I suggest what I am going to call “Machiavellian kindness”.
What if their appetite for death is actually weaker than advertised? What if we try to give them a taste of comfort and security with the diabolical awareness that people who become accustomed to weekends of rest and full bellies, who watch their kids reach milestones lose their edge. They get gluttonous and lazy. They become attached to material comforts and the expectations of retirement and grandkids.
Perhaps my cynical machinations are too wicked. But in desperate times when all else has failed, I think they’ve given us no other choice.
This feels like a bunch of Bush era talking points.
They aren’t orcs. There’s this notion that our adversaries are unable to demonstrate the self control they need to make environments safe to raise kids but possess motivation for self destruction that is inexaustible.
After exclusively putting more and more weight on the boot on their collective neck with nothing buts decades of successive failure, let’s try something else.
For those unmotivated by Christian mercy, I suggest what I am going to call “Machiavellian kindness”.
What if their appetite for death is actually weaker than advertised? What if we try to give them a taste of comfort and security with the diabolical awareness that people who become accustomed to weekends of rest and full bellies, who watch their kids reach milestones lose their edge. They get gluttonous and lazy. They become attached to material comforts and the expectations of retirement and grandkids.
Perhaps my cynical machinations are too wicked. But in desperate times when all else has failed, I think they’ve given us no other choice.
If you let them do this with no response every idiot nation with a coastline is going to think shooting civilian sailors is a good way to get shit done.
Allowing them to get away with it is escalatory for the world.
First, the logic works in reverse, too. If they are trying to pull us into a confrontation that they believe benefits them, allowing them to do so also demonstrates a tool for controlling the US that others will be motivated to use, and is also escalatory.
The problem is that we only think in personal, school yard fight terms. We’re act sad though each country has a singular, logically operating decision making process. In reality, international actors are much more like natural phenomena, like mold growth or rabbit populations.
I’m not saying the school yard logic is baseless. When the US flinches, that definitely affects how Xi Jinping assesses our willingness to respond with force to a recapture of Taiwan, for instance. But: whether he decides to do that is not based primarily on whether he thinks the country as a whole has balls or not. It’s based on a combination of benefits and draw backs.
So in the long run, if we wanted to prevent unification by force, we’re far better off engineering conditions that make unification a bad deal, even if we look weak rather than make it appealing enough to go to war even if we seem likely to destabilize the whole world over it
Yeah, I thought one of his strong points was supposed to be foreign policy, but his stance on Israel has isolated the US and seems to be fueling chaos in the Middle East. If he wanted to just say “I’ll do what I want, I’m the president”, he could have at least had the decency to not seek reelection and doom us all.
his stance on Israel has isolated the US
Lol. Okay.
I don’t understand what part of that you’re scoffing at.
The part where the US has isolated itself.
It has not.
The real mistake may have been attempting to pivot to Iran in an attempt to reinstate the JCPOA. As admirable a goal as that is, I also think it’s clear Trump squandered any trust Iran had in the US when he cancelled it. Iran has taken the Biden admin’s overtures as an opportunity to test its regional influence, instead of being a good faith negotiating partner - and why would the Biden admin have expected anything else when the US hadn’t been a good faith partner? Trump was awful on foreign policy, and set middle-east peace back decades, but Biden has completely failed to understand and adapt to the new status quo.
Part of me thinks, we’ll see Hilary2.0 unfolding in 2024. He should have picked Newsom and stepped down.
I hate Newsom. But you’re right, Biden looks like he’s going down in flames. I think he’s counting on Trump going to jail, because head-to-head, unless something changes, Trump is getting set up to coast to victory. It’s horrifying to watch.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say “coast to victory”, I think both men are deeply disliked by factions of their electorate and thus could lose, but if it was literally anyone but Trump, I’d say it’s already a foregone conclusion.
Thx Joe for another reason to not vote for you.
WWIII here we come!
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Enlighten us.
I’m being serious, not sarcastic, i really do want to know.
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Cool, thanks for the links
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we are already in the warm up for ww3 since the fucking russians invaded parts of ukraine and want to conquer big parts of europe…
I was talking about the cyber crime/ espionage attacks.
And I’m pretty sure it’s the US plus assorted allies agression that is inflaming tensions around the world.
you think west ist responsible for the atrocities the russians started 2014? LOL!
Yes
Then you are a hopeless person.
are you on crack or just a stupid tankie?
As a Democrat, thanks Joe, for giving me more reasons to vote for another.
Which therefore, unfortunately, is a vote helping trump.
Have some spine though. Call out a spade for a spade.
Edit: not directed at your comment. Only downvoters.
Enjoy Trump.
Enjoy choice
You’re not a Democrat. ✅
You don’t have any functioning neurons.
